In-group bias (Us/Them) is ingrained not just in humans but also in all hominids and many primates too. Preferring my family and my people over your family and people has nothing to do with "xenophobia" but everything to do with safety and survival. Kin groups and other social bonds were the social security, welfare, military and police before these things existed.
Only people far removed from the struggle to survive could even contemplate the idea of turning their societies into open bazaars where whoever arrived yesterday is a much a member of the community as someone whose family has been there multiple generations.
Universal egalitarianism is another remnant of our dying Christian roots ("There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."), but has become the sine qua non of liberal morality mostly because of the needs of the global marketplace and of our progressive aristocracy, who believe fervently in their own providential destiny to rule and who are held together not by nationality but by ideology, conformity and class interests.
Xenophilia/xenophobia has been made the hinge of modern liberal morality because of profits and because of the power needs of various bureaucrats, academics and journalists, who posit themselves as an enlightened priesthood ("Anyone can love their families, we love everyone!"), and who have ably weaponized this sentimentalized humanism as a way to paint all their opponents as dangerous and backwards bigots reeking of incipient Nazism.
One of the best parts of living at the top of the social pyramid in the very rich and very safe West is being able to wave away biology, anthropology or any inconvenient facts as too "unenlightened" to take seriously, to ignore it because no one else in your social strata would even think it. But all peoples and countries prefer themselves over arriving strangers—the Chinese keep out the Koreans, the Pakistanis keep out the Afghans, the Dominicans keep out the Haitians, etc etc.
None of this is bigoted or xenophobic, it is simply prioritizing reality and survival over the Marxist-Lennonist fantasy that defines Social Justice ideology, the great faith of our age held by all Western liberals.
How does this fit with the strong historical precedent of hospitality as a moral imperative? From Ancient Greece to Persia to Afghanistan we see a consistent pattern of insular, arguably xenophobic societies, enforcing powerful norms mandating the welcoming of complete strangers into one’s home as honoured guests.
So much so that many recorded Greek myths serve as warning that insufficient ξενῐ́ᾱ (“stranger friendship”), or mistreatment or insufficient welcoming of strangers incurs divine punishment and permanent dishonour.
How does this interact with the in group bias which we find? Is it something to do with the concept of reciprocity, where the host and guest both have specific obligations? Is that what is lost in the modern world? Or has the norm itself simply disappeared?
Most of what I know of the Greeks comes from Homer and the dramatists, and it seems that while hospitality and sanctuary were sacred commandments, the other side of the coin was that no one could actually join or ever belong to their hosts' tribes or cities. An Athenian was an Athenian and a Cretan was a Cretan etc and there was no way to change or escape that. The idea of human universalism or fungibility would have struck them as barbarous as killing a stranger praying at a shrine.
So there was still very much an Us/Them barrier, but the Them was honored as a guest, meaning as a temporary wayfarer not as someone who would ever be allowed to take part in the religious or political life of their hosts, which was rooted in soil, gods and ancestors. (I think also much of this comes from the fact that this was a civilization built on trading across the Mediterranean, where getting kidnapped or killed if you happened to wash ashore after a shipwreck would have made the underlying economic and social systems impossible.)
Of course there were allliances and marriages arranged on this basis and women could move to another tribe, but that would mean saying goodbye forever to your family, gods, and homeland. There was still a strong in-group bias in the ancient world, with a strong Us/Them binary, but that didn't preclude kindness to strangers. Nothing supplanted or preceded the idea that a polis was meant to protect and provide for its own people and no one else.
But of course all this changed with the advent of Christianity, a universal creed.
A high trust society must be enforced. It cannot be willed into existence, let alone assumed. Enforcement is the fundamental internal function of government. If government will not protect its people it is useless.
Tautological reasoning as used by Plato ('The Republic'):
Plato used tautology as a philosophical tool - the use of statements that are true by virtue of their logical structure, often highlighting redundancies in reasoning. He employed tautological reasoning to contrast ethical concepts, such as good vs. bad. By asking questions like "If the good man does this, what does the bad man do?" he aimed to clarify moral virtues and vices.
“To be trusted one must be trustworthy”. You don’t find that Plato using elenchus showed that people use words and terms that they don’t in fact understand? And this results in multiple logical faults? I’d recommend you read Meno on “arete”.
As a Swede, I consider this article very relevant reading, because Sweden is perhaps the clearest example of a — formerly? — high-trust society where xenophobia is one of the greatest taboos.
The question is what will happen now that the taboo is starting to break down, particularly among younger generations, because the negative effects of us taking in large numbers of genetically-distant peoples from low-trust societies are awkwardly obvious.
I personally fear balkanization along ethno-religious lines, as Professor David Betz at King’s College has predicted is likely to occur.
Xenophobia, just like any behavioral strategy, can be beneficial or harmful, depending on context.
Be too xenophilic, or better yet, erect a taboo that compels people to be indiscriminately xenophilic, and you might allow people into your country who make it worse off long term.
Even more importantly, we should consider whether xenophilia, say in its form of "colorblind equality" is feasible at all in a human society. The communist ideal of economic equality keeps sounding good on paper to many despite total failure. Colorblind equality sounds even better, but what results does it have to show for itself?
"Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within a community of people who, consciously or unconsciously, respect certain norms. It is thus culturally bound."
The problem with modern morality is that social science has been doing the heavy lifting of validating certain moral convictions, especially since WW2. Would people really be ok mass migration if social science hadn't convinced them that there are no socially important genetic differences between people?
"Some nuance is needed." Not even nuance, to overlook the type or source of immigrants in the article misses the point. Mexicans and Vietnamese, for one example, are prized immigrants in the U.S. and in famously anti-immigrant Japan, there are nearly a million Chinese now living and working. In both these places you will find strong opinions about other immigrants, a major political issue in each.
One other reflection. Clans, tribes, even civilizations would have never survived without being "xenophobic" and I'd venture it's instinctive amongst any and most groups. Japan, again, closed off to the world for hundreds of years and almost nobody Japanese or other wants their culture to change whatsover.
First time I've picked up someone else referencing HBD Chick (whoever she is). She has written quite valuable material about the subject of Muslim in-breeding, particularly the distinction between parallel- vs cross-cousin marriage practices.
The subject of Middle Eastern/Nth African cousin marriage has been touched upon recently but the very specific nuance about parallel/cross hasn't had its significance pointed out. One accumulates genetic faults over generations while the other can be easily resolved by out-marriage. Unfortunately its the former that predominates in the MENA and *diverse* communities in the West.
I don't buy that xenophobia is morally functional, even if it's functional in the sense that there are countries that have high trust + high xenophobia. Tons of rotten combinations have existed as far as civilizations go, and simply being extant isn't deserving of a trophy for virtue. I think trust itself is a conformity mechanism that punishes deviance, and therefore any out-group one can identify winds up on the shit list – immigrants and other cultures being the most obvious scapegoats in this case.
Peter, in your article, you make a really interesting point that high-trust societies actually have to be xenophobic to survive themselves. But, most of the data you gather seem to go against that argument.
You mention how most of the South Koreans support liberal immigration and super-majority accept immigrants as neighbors. You think that "suppressing misgivings" due to government trust is the reason for this. But if it is authority trust that makes one accept immigration possibility, then trust and xenophobia do not go hand in hand but rather are opposed to each other which is quite the opposite of your thesis. The same case is with Sweden and the EU: more trust equals more tolerance. So, you are trying to justify the data that disprove your main argument.
The paper you refer to "WEIRD" psychology (Schulz et al. 2019) goes against your argument, to say the least. In fact, it proves that weak kinship is related to universal moral concern rather than in-group favoritism. Individualism and impersonal prosociality do not correspond to shrinking circles of moral concern but rather to expanding ones. You have reversed the gist of the literature.
Your "Soviet freezer" theory can not be tested. One reason for Eastern European social conservatism may be, in part, their pre-communist agrarian traditions; continuation of conservatism as partly a post-communist reaction; and selective emigration of liberals. Using a historical mechanism that cannot be tested for simply explaining any pattern that is observed amounts to just-so storytelling.
Your closing vision Amish, Mormons, and Haredi Jews ultimately replacing the broader population is demographically illiterate. These groups are very small fractions with declining retention and assimilation-driven fertility decline. Even at current rates, replacement would take centuries. Meanwhile, integration models in Canada and Australia maintain social trust with high immigration, that is contrary to your either/or framing.
Most fundamentally, you commit the naturalistic fallacy throughout. Even if high trust were fragile and historically unusual even if exclusion preserved it this wouldn't make exclusion morally justified. You describe xenophobia as a "precondition for morality, " but morality that takes excluding others from moral consideration is not morality it's tribalism with a philosophical veneer.
What facts could make you change your mind? If it turned out that high-immigration societies with strong integration policies managed to keep or raise social trust for decades as Canada has would you reconsider your model? Or would you simply claim that those societies are "no longer truly high-trust"?
Your demographic history is only a portion of the facts. Western Europe's population increase was not caused solely by "reduced transaction costs." There are several reasons such as the agricultural revolution, colonial exploitation, the rise of public health, etc. The same high-mortality, low-trust scenario of Russian society in the 19th century also experienced a population surge. Also, the fertility decline is found to be closely related to female education and urbanization besides industrial labor markets only. Because of this, your straightforward economic explanation neglects the demographic transition theory.
How does this fit with the strong historical precedent of hospitality as a moral imperative? From Ancient Greece to Persia to Afghanistan we see a consistent pattern of insular, arguably xenophobic societies, enforcing powerful norms mandating the welcoming of complete strangers into one’s home as honoured guests.
So much so that many recorded Greek myths serve as warning that insufficient ξενῐ́ᾱ (“stranger friendship”), or mistreatment or insufficient welcoming of strangers incurs divine punishment and permanent dishonour.
Could it be that the aversion to strangers in Eastern Europe reflects the erosion of those norms by decades of political surveillance and repression rather than a “traditional freezer” effect? Or did hospitality norms never exist in the relevant way further from the Mediterranean to begin with?
It's sufficient to halt immigration. The long-term trend is below-replacement fertility for all human populations, with WEIRD populations having the highest fertility.
Many won't be that moderate, even assuming that fertility hypothesis is correct.
If an authentic identitarian/remigration party ever wins and the propaganda stops, what compelling moral reasons will you give the populace why they should subsidize a slew of costly and hostile minorities forever in their lands? If instead they can be peacefully incentivized to leave (cut benefits, sponsor repatriation etc)?
I'm talking more about Europe than the US/Canada here. I don't see this very feasible in the US/Canada anymore.
The propaganda will never stop. The populations of Europe, especially those of northwest Europe, have an unusually high capacity for empathy and guilt. That won't change. And plenty of people will continue to exploit this psychological weakness. So that won't change either.
Bismark said that politics is the art of the possible. It's also the art of knowing what is most important. Your priority should be to halt immigration and to keep it halted for at least the next three decades. That goal, in itself, will use up most of your political capital.
To quote another 19th-century politician: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, the current crew of "slopulists" seem to be doing the opposite, like carrying out high-profile ICE raids in red states when far more can be done by removing the incentives for immigration, i.e., by implementing e-verify and by enforcing minimum wage laws.
So I agree with your point about removing the incentives for immigration. But isn't "remigration" a lot more than that? Isn't it the removal of people who were born in Europe and have full citizenship rights?
The propeganda has mostly stopped in Sweden. We reached a political consensus, whereby both the Left Social Democrats and the right-wing parties agree that our earlier policies were a terrible mistake and that multi-culturalism is undesirable by definition. The Left Party (Communist) still argues these things, but ignoring the Left Party is an extremely well-established political practice. Next election will be waged over "which party will be more effective at making the immigrants integrate" and expelling the undesirables (unless all that people care about is Energy prices, not letting the German demand increase local prices, and who can get the planned new nuclear power plants built fastest, which could happen.) We are very pro-expell-the-people-with-bad (not necessarily convicted-criminal) lifestyles, and all the gang members and their families.
Scandinavian opponents of mass immigration seem to be showing the right mix of intelligence and pragmatism. I say "seem" because I used to feel the same way about Giorgia Meloni.
Your major problem will not be the "left". It will be pressure from the business community to fill "labor shortages" with foreign workers. If you go that route, you will end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg, i.e., the high-trust society that has made Sweden so successful economically and socially.
We really don't have much in the way of low-skilled workers that benefit businesses around here. The Baumol Effect bites really hard here. If the MENA workers were all engineers that would be a problem, because we have a chronic shortage of those after absorbing all we can produce. But they aren't. We've
got new laws which make it a requirement that immigrants earn 90% of the median wage, up from 80%. The idea was floated to make a small number of low paying jobs that were in great demand exempt, but this seems to have been quietly scrapped. The strawberry-pickers are mostly Poles these days. The fast food restarants are all self-serve with automated menu selection. Other things are being done by robots as soon as we can design them. There are a great many Thai and Vietnamese women who become nurses, and nobody has a problem with them, but then you get stories like this, where nearly 400 elderly women were raped by their state-provided caretakers. https://www.katjanouch.se/p/the-swedish-grooming-scandal-how
This has had an effect that people around here are no longer afraid of being called racist. Racism may be a problem but letting the grandmothers be raped and doing nothing is a worse one.
People who were born in a European country or Australia to foreign-born parents aren't necessarily citizens of that country (unlike in Canada and the U.S. and much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere.) Even if they were citizens, Parliaments can make any laws they want (at the cost of political capital, yes.) If they want to badly enough, they can revoke local citizenship of all people they don't like who have foreign citizenship as well, and deport them to the country they are citizens of. The other country may baulk at accepting its citizens who have never lived there but that's where countries like Rwanda come in, who will accept cast-offs if the price is right. A country like the U.S. can cut foreign aid or even threaten military action against a country that won't take its citizens back. A little out of reach for most European countries. Never said it would be easy.
One look at history and one sees that permanent conflict, denaturalizations, deportations, displacement, and yes, genocide, are the historical norm. We suffer from recency bias of the last 80 years, or perhaps a few hundred years of relative peace and benevolent domination of the West, and infer from that it will be smooth sailing from here on out forever. That's extremely naive. It might not flip now or even in 50 years. But it's inevitable in the future, even in Europe and the US (or Australia).
Did you mention the Germans, Peter? How outgroup-empathetic were the Germans some 90 years ago? Same genes, different environment. And how peaceful were the Europeans if we look back in history further than 80 years? I'm not much of a historian, but I do remember European history being a continuous stream of wars. This all suggests to me that the picture of peaceful and empathetic (Northwestern) Europeans from now on into eternity might be a product of recency bias and Fukuyama-esque fallacies. If the conditions get bad enough, there will be a regression to the historical mean.
Regarding Remigration, it is a continuum of policies. The propaganda machine will tell you it's literally Hitlerian ethnic cleansing (wikipedia doesn't disappoint), while policy papers propose peaceful means - e.g. Martin Sellner, Restore Britain etc. The peaceful policies are already in place in several Euro countries and accelerating. E-verify would make a lot of sense in the US AFAIK.
I certainly didn't mention that they — or anyone else — was outgroup-empathetic some 90 years ago. This is a recent historical development, my dear Marvin.
Do I have to repeat what I wrote in this post? A high-trust community can exist only if there is a boundary between insiders and outsiders. And this boundary is defined in moral terms. The outsider isn't simply a stranger. The outsider is an untrustworthy inferior.
Over the past 90 years, however, the line between insider and outsider has been erased in high-trust societies. Again, this is a recent development, and it's not sustainable.
All of that is discussed in my article. In fact, it's the main thrust of my article. Yet you didn't catch any of it.
You misread/misunderstood my comment and instead inferred I didn't read your article and don't understand immigration pathology 101.
Pretty sure the Bismark guy was German, and that Germans are NW Europeans. You did mention them both in your previous comment, right?
But perhaps my comment was too cryptic. Let me clarify:
Your point was the (pro-immigration/multicultural) propaganda will never stop. My point was it CAN stop. Example - Weimar Germany 90 years ago. I.e. it can FLIP if the conditions get bad enough.
Therefore remigration, even the coercive kind, is well within the realm of the possible. That was my point. Are we on the same page?
In-group bias (Us/Them) is ingrained not just in humans but also in all hominids and many primates too. Preferring my family and my people over your family and people has nothing to do with "xenophobia" but everything to do with safety and survival. Kin groups and other social bonds were the social security, welfare, military and police before these things existed.
Only people far removed from the struggle to survive could even contemplate the idea of turning their societies into open bazaars where whoever arrived yesterday is a much a member of the community as someone whose family has been there multiple generations.
Universal egalitarianism is another remnant of our dying Christian roots ("There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."), but has become the sine qua non of liberal morality mostly because of the needs of the global marketplace and of our progressive aristocracy, who believe fervently in their own providential destiny to rule and who are held together not by nationality but by ideology, conformity and class interests.
Xenophilia/xenophobia has been made the hinge of modern liberal morality because of profits and because of the power needs of various bureaucrats, academics and journalists, who posit themselves as an enlightened priesthood ("Anyone can love their families, we love everyone!"), and who have ably weaponized this sentimentalized humanism as a way to paint all their opponents as dangerous and backwards bigots reeking of incipient Nazism.
One of the best parts of living at the top of the social pyramid in the very rich and very safe West is being able to wave away biology, anthropology or any inconvenient facts as too "unenlightened" to take seriously, to ignore it because no one else in your social strata would even think it. But all peoples and countries prefer themselves over arriving strangers—the Chinese keep out the Koreans, the Pakistanis keep out the Afghans, the Dominicans keep out the Haitians, etc etc.
None of this is bigoted or xenophobic, it is simply prioritizing reality and survival over the Marxist-Lennonist fantasy that defines Social Justice ideology, the great faith of our age held by all Western liberals.
How does this fit with the strong historical precedent of hospitality as a moral imperative? From Ancient Greece to Persia to Afghanistan we see a consistent pattern of insular, arguably xenophobic societies, enforcing powerful norms mandating the welcoming of complete strangers into one’s home as honoured guests.
So much so that many recorded Greek myths serve as warning that insufficient ξενῐ́ᾱ (“stranger friendship”), or mistreatment or insufficient welcoming of strangers incurs divine punishment and permanent dishonour.
How does this interact with the in group bias which we find? Is it something to do with the concept of reciprocity, where the host and guest both have specific obligations? Is that what is lost in the modern world? Or has the norm itself simply disappeared?
Most of what I know of the Greeks comes from Homer and the dramatists, and it seems that while hospitality and sanctuary were sacred commandments, the other side of the coin was that no one could actually join or ever belong to their hosts' tribes or cities. An Athenian was an Athenian and a Cretan was a Cretan etc and there was no way to change or escape that. The idea of human universalism or fungibility would have struck them as barbarous as killing a stranger praying at a shrine.
So there was still very much an Us/Them barrier, but the Them was honored as a guest, meaning as a temporary wayfarer not as someone who would ever be allowed to take part in the religious or political life of their hosts, which was rooted in soil, gods and ancestors. (I think also much of this comes from the fact that this was a civilization built on trading across the Mediterranean, where getting kidnapped or killed if you happened to wash ashore after a shipwreck would have made the underlying economic and social systems impossible.)
Of course there were allliances and marriages arranged on this basis and women could move to another tribe, but that would mean saying goodbye forever to your family, gods, and homeland. There was still a strong in-group bias in the ancient world, with a strong Us/Them binary, but that didn't preclude kindness to strangers. Nothing supplanted or preceded the idea that a polis was meant to protect and provide for its own people and no one else.
But of course all this changed with the advent of Christianity, a universal creed.
To be trusted, one must be trustworthy. Trust must be earned. Betrayal of trust must have consequences.
A high trust society must be enforced. It cannot be willed into existence, let alone assumed. Enforcement is the fundamental internal function of government. If government will not protect its people it is useless.
Tautological.
Not at all. Unearned trust is foolish. Trust which continues after it has been betrayed is doubly foolish.
Blather. Read some Plato if you can manage.
Tautological reasoning as used by Plato ('The Republic'):
Plato used tautology as a philosophical tool - the use of statements that are true by virtue of their logical structure, often highlighting redundancies in reasoning. He employed tautological reasoning to contrast ethical concepts, such as good vs. bad. By asking questions like "If the good man does this, what does the bad man do?" he aimed to clarify moral virtues and vices.
“To be trusted one must be trustworthy”. You don’t find that Plato using elenchus showed that people use words and terms that they don’t in fact understand? And this results in multiple logical faults? I’d recommend you read Meno on “arete”.
Bad things happen when folks can no longer rely on their governments to "do the right thing".
As a Swede, I consider this article very relevant reading, because Sweden is perhaps the clearest example of a — formerly? — high-trust society where xenophobia is one of the greatest taboos.
The question is what will happen now that the taboo is starting to break down, particularly among younger generations, because the negative effects of us taking in large numbers of genetically-distant peoples from low-trust societies are awkwardly obvious.
I personally fear balkanization along ethno-religious lines, as Professor David Betz at King’s College has predicted is likely to occur.
Xenophobia, just like any behavioral strategy, can be beneficial or harmful, depending on context.
Be too xenophilic, or better yet, erect a taboo that compels people to be indiscriminately xenophilic, and you might allow people into your country who make it worse off long term.
Even more importantly, we should consider whether xenophilia, say in its form of "colorblind equality" is feasible at all in a human society. The communist ideal of economic equality keeps sounding good on paper to many despite total failure. Colorblind equality sounds even better, but what results does it have to show for itself?
'We will be replaced, but by people like us'.
This must be the most optimistic sentence I've read in a long time. Oh, how I would love it to be true.
re: declining fertility
There is also the possibility of a more child-friendly lifestyle: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Starting with Gen-Z: https://lukelea.substack.com/
Try not to laugh.
"Morality doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It exists within a community of people who, consciously or unconsciously, respect certain norms. It is thus culturally bound."
The problem with modern morality is that social science has been doing the heavy lifting of validating certain moral convictions, especially since WW2. Would people really be ok mass migration if social science hadn't convinced them that there are no socially important genetic differences between people?
"Some nuance is needed." Not even nuance, to overlook the type or source of immigrants in the article misses the point. Mexicans and Vietnamese, for one example, are prized immigrants in the U.S. and in famously anti-immigrant Japan, there are nearly a million Chinese now living and working. In both these places you will find strong opinions about other immigrants, a major political issue in each.
One other reflection. Clans, tribes, even civilizations would have never survived without being "xenophobic" and I'd venture it's instinctive amongst any and most groups. Japan, again, closed off to the world for hundreds of years and almost nobody Japanese or other wants their culture to change whatsover.
First time I've picked up someone else referencing HBD Chick (whoever she is). She has written quite valuable material about the subject of Muslim in-breeding, particularly the distinction between parallel- vs cross-cousin marriage practices.
The subject of Middle Eastern/Nth African cousin marriage has been touched upon recently but the very specific nuance about parallel/cross hasn't had its significance pointed out. One accumulates genetic faults over generations while the other can be easily resolved by out-marriage. Unfortunately its the former that predominates in the MENA and *diverse* communities in the West.
I don't buy that xenophobia is morally functional, even if it's functional in the sense that there are countries that have high trust + high xenophobia. Tons of rotten combinations have existed as far as civilizations go, and simply being extant isn't deserving of a trophy for virtue. I think trust itself is a conformity mechanism that punishes deviance, and therefore any out-group one can identify winds up on the shit list – immigrants and other cultures being the most obvious scapegoats in this case.
"Simply being extant isn't deserving of a trophy for virtue."
It is better to live than to be a dead man for the rest of your life.
Alternate reply: history is written by survivors, and survivors get to define their past as "virtuous."
Peter, in your article, you make a really interesting point that high-trust societies actually have to be xenophobic to survive themselves. But, most of the data you gather seem to go against that argument.
You mention how most of the South Koreans support liberal immigration and super-majority accept immigrants as neighbors. You think that "suppressing misgivings" due to government trust is the reason for this. But if it is authority trust that makes one accept immigration possibility, then trust and xenophobia do not go hand in hand but rather are opposed to each other which is quite the opposite of your thesis. The same case is with Sweden and the EU: more trust equals more tolerance. So, you are trying to justify the data that disprove your main argument.
The paper you refer to "WEIRD" psychology (Schulz et al. 2019) goes against your argument, to say the least. In fact, it proves that weak kinship is related to universal moral concern rather than in-group favoritism. Individualism and impersonal prosociality do not correspond to shrinking circles of moral concern but rather to expanding ones. You have reversed the gist of the literature.
Your "Soviet freezer" theory can not be tested. One reason for Eastern European social conservatism may be, in part, their pre-communist agrarian traditions; continuation of conservatism as partly a post-communist reaction; and selective emigration of liberals. Using a historical mechanism that cannot be tested for simply explaining any pattern that is observed amounts to just-so storytelling.
Your closing vision Amish, Mormons, and Haredi Jews ultimately replacing the broader population is demographically illiterate. These groups are very small fractions with declining retention and assimilation-driven fertility decline. Even at current rates, replacement would take centuries. Meanwhile, integration models in Canada and Australia maintain social trust with high immigration, that is contrary to your either/or framing.
Most fundamentally, you commit the naturalistic fallacy throughout. Even if high trust were fragile and historically unusual even if exclusion preserved it this wouldn't make exclusion morally justified. You describe xenophobia as a "precondition for morality, " but morality that takes excluding others from moral consideration is not morality it's tribalism with a philosophical veneer.
What facts could make you change your mind? If it turned out that high-immigration societies with strong integration policies managed to keep or raise social trust for decades as Canada has would you reconsider your model? Or would you simply claim that those societies are "no longer truly high-trust"?
Your demographic history is only a portion of the facts. Western Europe's population increase was not caused solely by "reduced transaction costs." There are several reasons such as the agricultural revolution, colonial exploitation, the rise of public health, etc. The same high-mortality, low-trust scenario of Russian society in the 19th century also experienced a population surge. Also, the fertility decline is found to be closely related to female education and urbanization besides industrial labor markets only. Because of this, your straightforward economic explanation neglects the demographic transition theory.
How does this fit with the strong historical precedent of hospitality as a moral imperative? From Ancient Greece to Persia to Afghanistan we see a consistent pattern of insular, arguably xenophobic societies, enforcing powerful norms mandating the welcoming of complete strangers into one’s home as honoured guests.
So much so that many recorded Greek myths serve as warning that insufficient ξενῐ́ᾱ (“stranger friendship”), or mistreatment or insufficient welcoming of strangers incurs divine punishment and permanent dishonour.
Could it be that the aversion to strangers in Eastern Europe reflects the erosion of those norms by decades of political surveillance and repression rather than a “traditional freezer” effect? Or did hospitality norms never exist in the relevant way further from the Mediterranean to begin with?
The extreme form of xenophobia is Talmudism.
I disagree.
Did you misplace your copy of the mishna?
I don't have a personal copy. Anyway, it would be difficult to misplace, given its size.
I wonder what aporia does think of "Remigration" .Like literal remigration
This was my take:
https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/renaud-camus-and-remigration
—NC
It's sufficient to halt immigration. The long-term trend is below-replacement fertility for all human populations, with WEIRD populations having the highest fertility.
Many won't be that moderate, even assuming that fertility hypothesis is correct.
If an authentic identitarian/remigration party ever wins and the propaganda stops, what compelling moral reasons will you give the populace why they should subsidize a slew of costly and hostile minorities forever in their lands? If instead they can be peacefully incentivized to leave (cut benefits, sponsor repatriation etc)?
I'm talking more about Europe than the US/Canada here. I don't see this very feasible in the US/Canada anymore.
The propaganda will never stop. The populations of Europe, especially those of northwest Europe, have an unusually high capacity for empathy and guilt. That won't change. And plenty of people will continue to exploit this psychological weakness. So that won't change either.
Bismark said that politics is the art of the possible. It's also the art of knowing what is most important. Your priority should be to halt immigration and to keep it halted for at least the next three decades. That goal, in itself, will use up most of your political capital.
To quote another 19th-century politician: "Speak softly and carry a big stick." Unlike Teddy Roosevelt, the current crew of "slopulists" seem to be doing the opposite, like carrying out high-profile ICE raids in red states when far more can be done by removing the incentives for immigration, i.e., by implementing e-verify and by enforcing minimum wage laws.
So I agree with your point about removing the incentives for immigration. But isn't "remigration" a lot more than that? Isn't it the removal of people who were born in Europe and have full citizenship rights?
The propeganda has mostly stopped in Sweden. We reached a political consensus, whereby both the Left Social Democrats and the right-wing parties agree that our earlier policies were a terrible mistake and that multi-culturalism is undesirable by definition. The Left Party (Communist) still argues these things, but ignoring the Left Party is an extremely well-established political practice. Next election will be waged over "which party will be more effective at making the immigrants integrate" and expelling the undesirables (unless all that people care about is Energy prices, not letting the German demand increase local prices, and who can get the planned new nuclear power plants built fastest, which could happen.) We are very pro-expell-the-people-with-bad (not necessarily convicted-criminal) lifestyles, and all the gang members and their families.
Scandinavian opponents of mass immigration seem to be showing the right mix of intelligence and pragmatism. I say "seem" because I used to feel the same way about Giorgia Meloni.
Your major problem will not be the "left". It will be pressure from the business community to fill "labor shortages" with foreign workers. If you go that route, you will end up killing the goose that laid the golden egg, i.e., the high-trust society that has made Sweden so successful economically and socially.
We really don't have much in the way of low-skilled workers that benefit businesses around here. The Baumol Effect bites really hard here. If the MENA workers were all engineers that would be a problem, because we have a chronic shortage of those after absorbing all we can produce. But they aren't. We've
got new laws which make it a requirement that immigrants earn 90% of the median wage, up from 80%. The idea was floated to make a small number of low paying jobs that were in great demand exempt, but this seems to have been quietly scrapped. The strawberry-pickers are mostly Poles these days. The fast food restarants are all self-serve with automated menu selection. Other things are being done by robots as soon as we can design them. There are a great many Thai and Vietnamese women who become nurses, and nobody has a problem with them, but then you get stories like this, where nearly 400 elderly women were raped by their state-provided caretakers. https://www.katjanouch.se/p/the-swedish-grooming-scandal-how
This has had an effect that people around here are no longer afraid of being called racist. Racism may be a problem but letting the grandmothers be raped and doing nothing is a worse one.
People who were born in a European country or Australia to foreign-born parents aren't necessarily citizens of that country (unlike in Canada and the U.S. and much of the rest of the Western Hemisphere.) Even if they were citizens, Parliaments can make any laws they want (at the cost of political capital, yes.) If they want to badly enough, they can revoke local citizenship of all people they don't like who have foreign citizenship as well, and deport them to the country they are citizens of. The other country may baulk at accepting its citizens who have never lived there but that's where countries like Rwanda come in, who will accept cast-offs if the price is right. A country like the U.S. can cut foreign aid or even threaten military action against a country that won't take its citizens back. A little out of reach for most European countries. Never said it would be easy.
One look at history and one sees that permanent conflict, denaturalizations, deportations, displacement, and yes, genocide, are the historical norm. We suffer from recency bias of the last 80 years, or perhaps a few hundred years of relative peace and benevolent domination of the West, and infer from that it will be smooth sailing from here on out forever. That's extremely naive. It might not flip now or even in 50 years. But it's inevitable in the future, even in Europe and the US (or Australia).
Did you mention the Germans, Peter? How outgroup-empathetic were the Germans some 90 years ago? Same genes, different environment. And how peaceful were the Europeans if we look back in history further than 80 years? I'm not much of a historian, but I do remember European history being a continuous stream of wars. This all suggests to me that the picture of peaceful and empathetic (Northwestern) Europeans from now on into eternity might be a product of recency bias and Fukuyama-esque fallacies. If the conditions get bad enough, there will be a regression to the historical mean.
Regarding Remigration, it is a continuum of policies. The propaganda machine will tell you it's literally Hitlerian ethnic cleansing (wikipedia doesn't disappoint), while policy papers propose peaceful means - e.g. Martin Sellner, Restore Britain etc. The peaceful policies are already in place in several Euro countries and accelerating. E-verify would make a lot of sense in the US AFAIK.
I didn't mention the Germans, Marvin. You did.
I certainly didn't mention that they — or anyone else — was outgroup-empathetic some 90 years ago. This is a recent historical development, my dear Marvin.
Do I have to repeat what I wrote in this post? A high-trust community can exist only if there is a boundary between insiders and outsiders. And this boundary is defined in moral terms. The outsider isn't simply a stranger. The outsider is an untrustworthy inferior.
Over the past 90 years, however, the line between insider and outsider has been erased in high-trust societies. Again, this is a recent development, and it's not sustainable.
All of that is discussed in my article. In fact, it's the main thrust of my article. Yet you didn't catch any of it.
You misread/misunderstood my comment and instead inferred I didn't read your article and don't understand immigration pathology 101.
Pretty sure the Bismark guy was German, and that Germans are NW Europeans. You did mention them both in your previous comment, right?
But perhaps my comment was too cryptic. Let me clarify:
Your point was the (pro-immigration/multicultural) propaganda will never stop. My point was it CAN stop. Example - Weimar Germany 90 years ago. I.e. it can FLIP if the conditions get bad enough.
Therefore remigration, even the coercive kind, is well within the realm of the possible. That was my point. Are we on the same page?